Nigel Wrench | |
|---|---|
| Born | Stephen Wrench |
| Occupation(s) | Radio presenter, Reporter |
| Known for | Interviewing Winnie Mandela and Banksy; HIV activism |
Stephen Wrench, known professionally as Nigel Wrench, is a British radio presenter and reporter. In the 1980s, he reported extensively from South Africa, and later in London enjoyed a successful 20-year career with the BBC. Wrench is the only journalist known to have interviewed both the artist known as Banksy and the South African activist Winnie Mandela, and continued his journalistic work despite a close brush with death from AIDS-related illness.
Wrench's first radio job was with Capital Radio 604, which provided the first independent source of broadcast news in South Africa.
At Turnstyle News, an independent Johannesburg-based radio news agency, Wrench reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the UK-based Independent Radio News and London Broadcasting Company.
In December 1985, he was among those detained briefly by police when reporting the illegal return of Winnie Mandela to Soweto. [1]
Reporting on demonstrations in Windhoek, Namibia, in September 1988, he was among those beaten up by police. [2]
Wrench was also a pop music columnist for the Mail & Guardian [3] and reported on Johannesburg's thriving underground nightlife.
In 1989 Wrench joined the BBC as a London-based reporter for the Today programme. In 1990, he was among the reporters at the prison gates when Nelson Mandela walked free. [4] Wrench reported from a wide variety of other locations for BBC Radio including Jerusalem, St Petersburg, Bucharest, Kyiv and Bosnia.
Wrench was a founding co-host of Out This Week , an LGBT+ news programme on BBC Radio 5 Live for which he won a Sony Radio Award. He later won a New York Radio Award for his 1998 Radio 4 documentary Aids and Me, [5] while also regularly co-presenting the Radio 4 programme PM . [6] Wrench's spell as culture reporter for PM , saw him interviewing leading artists, performers, playwrights and novelists as well as reporting regularly from the Edinburgh Festival. [7]
Wrench interviewed Banksy on PM at the opening of "Turf War", the first Banksy exhibition in London in 2003. [8]
Among Wrench's many radio documentaries was a major BBC World Service series Pills, Patients and Profits [9] which examined the global pharmaceutical industry.
In February 2015 Wrench released ZA86, [10] a limited-edition cassette, through specialist label The Tapeworm. [11] A sleeve note describes it as: "apartheid South Africa, 1986, through the headphones of a young radio reporter". [12] A review in The Quietus took the opportunity to sum up his career: "Few journalists have quite so intimately captured the essence of their era's great moral panics as Nigel Wrench". [13]
Wrench's second cassette for Tapeworm, ZA87, [14] a piece of audio verité documenting a political funeral in Soweto in 1987, was released in March 2021.
Wrench was for many years a voluntary director of Duckie Ltd, the award-winning LGBT+ performance group. [15]
Nigel Wrench now uses the name he was born with, Stephen Wrench, and has contributed, among others, an interview with Lloyd Russell-Moyle for Brighton's Gscene magazine. [16]
In April 2022, Wrench released a field recording called /Disco/Football recorded at non league alt-football outfit Whitehawk FC.
"Switch Off That Machine",released in May 2025, is a third collection of archive recordings intended, a sleeve note says, as “a warning for the present and the future, from the past of apartheid South Africa", digitally free on Bandcamp [17] and as a limited edition compact disc. Bandcamp rated "Switch Off That Machine" as one of 'The Best Field Recordings of May 2025' [18] .
In November 2023, Wrench's full interview with Banksy was released by the BBC [19] in which Banksy reveals his first name as "Robbie", [20] in a podcast [21] which attracted worldwide attention. [22] [23] [24]
Wrench came out as HIV-positive in 1994, in a speech while accepting his Sony Radio Award. [25] He wrote extensively about living with HIV and AIDS, including a regular column for the Pink Paper [26] and made a television documentary called From Russia With Love for BBC3 in 2003. [27] He remains the only broadcaster with a declared AIDS diagnosis to broadcast a live BBC Radio programme, after he returned from a brush with death from PCP, an AIDS-related pneumonia, to work behind the microphone at the PM programme in 1996. [28] Later, Wrench wrote of being a long-term survivor of AIDS [29] for Brighton's Scene magazine in November 2021, saying "there are costs to this survival. There are the side effects of both medication and HIV itself, usually with long names: peripheral neuropathy causing constant pins and needles in hands and feet; lipodystrophy, which means I'm a really weird shape and pancreatic insufficiency which requires a handful of pills to digest food". [30] In May 2025, Wrench released a third collection of archive recordings, ’Switch Off That Machine', available digitally free on Bandcamp [31] and to buy as a limited edition compact disc. Bandcamp rated it as one of 'The Best Field Recordings of May 2025' [32] .
Wrench now lives in Brighton where, along with being a fan of non-league Whitehawk FC [33] as one of the non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic Hawks Ultras, [34] he is also a volunteer shepherd. [35]